If someone reposts a creator's video without asking, the path is well worn. The creator made the video, they hold the copyright, and a takedown notice does the job.
If an AI-generated image of that same creator's face turns up in an ad, the copyright claim goes nowhere. Nobody copied their work. Something new was made that happens to look like them.
That gap is where most of the confusion about "owning your likeness" lives. A face is not a photograph, and it is not owned the way a photograph is owned. There is no title deed to a person's appearance.
What exists instead is a set of separate legal rights, each covering a different thing. The one that deals most directly with a person's identity is the right of publicity, and it works differently from the intellectual property rules creators already know.
What Is the Right of Publicity?
The right of publicity is the legal right to control commercial use of your identity. It prevents unauthorized commercial use of a person's name, likeness, or other recognizable aspects of their persona, and gives that person the exclusive right to license their identity for commercial promotion.
The idea is younger than most people assume. The term was coined in 1953, in a Second Circuit case over baseball card contracts, where the court recognized that a player had an economic interest in his own image that could be assigned to someone else. Before that, using a person's picture without asking was treated mainly as a privacy problem.
Treating it as property changed what it is good for. A privacy right is about being left alone. A property right can be licensed, valued, and enforced, which is why it became the foundation for endorsement deals and, more recently, for AI likeness agreements.
The catch is that it is a state right. In the United States it lives almost entirely in state common law and state statutes, and only about half of states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity by that name. There is no federal version.
What Parts of Your Identity Can the Right of Publicity Protect?
The short answer is anything that makes a person identifiable, though the specifics depend on which state's law applies.
1. Your Name
Names are the oldest category and the most consistently covered. This includes stage names, handles, and nicknames the public associates with a person, not just a legal name. A creator known by a username has a reasonable argument that the username is the identifying part.
2. Your Image and Likeness
This covers photographs, video, drawings, and any visual depiction where the person is recognizable. Courts have consistently focused on recognition rather than accuracy. The question is whether an ordinary viewer would identify the person, not whether the depiction is a faithful reproduction.
3. Your Voice
Voice is protected in many states, and the case that established it is worth knowing because of how closely it matches what AI does now. In 1988, Ford wanted Bette Midler for a commercial. She declined, so the agency hired one of her former backup singers to imitate her. Ford held a valid license from the song's copyright holder, and the commercial used neither Midler's name nor her picture.
She won anyway. The Ninth Circuit held that when a distinctive, widely known professional voice is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the seller has appropriated something that was not theirs. California's statute did not reach an imitation of a voice, so the court decided the case under the state's common law right instead.
The sequence is the part to hold onto. Every copyright box was checked, and the claim still succeeded, because the thing being taken was never covered by copyright.
4. Other Recognizable Parts of Your Identity
Some states extend further, to signatures, catchphrases, and distinctive props or personal style. In a 1992 case, an ad featuring a robot in a blond wig, gown, and jewelry, posed on a set resembling Wheel of Fortune, was found to have appropriated Vanna White's identity even though it used no photograph of her and never named her.
That decision drew a sharp dissent from Judge Alex Kozinski, who argued the ruling created a sweeping new property right in anything that reminds a viewer of a famous person. The disagreement was never fully settled, and it is the same argument now surfacing around AI content that resembles someone without copying them.
When Does the Right of Publicity Apply?
The center of gravity is commercial exploitation. The clearest cases involve using someone's identity to sell something:
- Advertising
- Product endorsements
- Promotions and sponsored placements
- Merchandise
- Any use that trades on a person's recognition to move a product
Endorsements sit at the sharpest end of this, because a fake one borrows credibility along with appearance. AI-generated endorsements are the version creators run into most, and they cost a creator something the sale itself never touches.
Not every use of a person's face creates a claim, though. The right generally applies to the sale of products or services and does not reach non-commercial uses, such as images accompanying news reporting. News, commentary, biography, parody, and artistic work all get weighed against First Amendment protection, and courts do that weighing case by case rather than by category.
So the analysis is rarely just whether your face is in something. It is closer to what the use was for, who it was aimed at, whether it implied approval, and which state's law governs the question.
How AI Is Challenging Traditional Publicity Rights
None of the doctrine above was written with generated content in mind, and it is being applied to it now. Four questions keep coming up.
1. When No Original Image Ever Existed
An AI-generated photo of a creator has no photographer and no underlying work. There is nothing to compare it against for infringement. Recognition becomes the only test that still functions, which pushes all of the weight onto publicity law.
2. When the Endorsement Is Fabricated Rather Than Misused
Older cases involved real footage or a real performance being reused past its permission. Generated endorsements skip that step. The person never sat for the shoot, so the dispute is about identity alone, with no contract and no original recording anywhere in the record.
3. When the Voice Is Synthetic
This is already in court. In 2024, two voice actors sued the AI voice company Lovo, saying it used their recordings to build and sell commercial voice clones. Their claims included breach of contract, Lanham Act violations, copyright, and New York's right of publicity statutes. In July 2025 the court dismissed the federal trademark claims and most of the copyright claims, and let the right of publicity and contract claims move forward. The federal IP theories fell away and the state identity law held.
4. When It Is Recognizable Without Being a Copy
A generated person can carry someone's build, styling, mannerisms, and setting without matching their face closely enough to call it a replica. That is the White v. Samsung question, thirty years on and at production volume, and courts have not resolved where the line sits.
The U.S. Copyright Office looked at all of this in its July 2024 report on digital replicas. It found that while most states recognize some form of privacy or publicity right capable of covering unauthorized replicas, that protection is not available everywhere and is limited in important respects. Its recommendation was a new federal right rather than a patch to the existing ones.
How the Right of Publicity Differs From Copyright and Trademark
These three get used interchangeably in conversation and cover genuinely different ground.
Right of Publicity vs. Copyright
Copyright protects a fixed creative work. The right of publicity protects a person.
A portrait makes the split easy to see. The photographer generally owns the copyright in the image as a creative work. The subject may separately hold publicity rights governing certain commercial uses of their identity within it. Two different owners, two different things owned, out of one photograph.
This is also why a creator's own catalog of videos gives them so little leverage over an AI likeness. They own the footage. The face in the footage is a separate question, governed by separate law.
Right of Publicity vs. Trademark
Trademark protects source identifiers. A brand name, a logo, or a signature packaging style tells buyers where a product came from, and the law protects that signal so buyers are not misled.
A person's identity can function as a trademark when it operates as a brand. The right of publicity asks for none of that. It attaches to the person because the identity is theirs, with no registration, no goods, and no need to show that consumers were confused about who made something.
Some people are now pursuing both. Matthew McConaughey's team has secured eight trademark registrations from the USPTO covering his voice and persona, aimed at AI misuse, and Taylor Swift's company filed its own applications in April 2026. State publicity law already covers commercial misuse, so the point of the filings is federal court standing and nationwide reach.
Why Right of Publicity Laws Vary by State
There is no single national rule. What counts as a protected attribute, how long the right lasts, whether it survives death, and what a person has to prove all change at the state line.
A few states have written AI directly into their statutes. New York, for one, added a digital replica provision covering deceased performers. Others still rely on common law written decades before any of this existed. A creator in one state may have a clear statutory claim while a creator in another has to argue from older privacy doctrine.
Where the misuse happened, where the creator lives, and where the company sits can each pull in a different direction. This patchwork is a large part of why federal proposals exist, and our breakdown of what the NO FAKES Act means for creators covers what a national standard would change.
What Creators Actually Own
Owning a likeness is not like owning a photograph. No single right covers a face the way copyright covers a video file.
What creators have is narrower and more specific. The right of publicity can give them grounds to act against certain commercial uses of their identity, subject to their state's rules and the First Amendment. Copyright covers the work they make. Trademark covers a brand if they have built one. Each does part of the job, and none of them does all of it.
AI raises the stakes on knowing which is which, because a recognizable identity can now appear in content the person never participated in making. There is no original to point to and no contract to reference, so the claim attached to the person is often the only one that fits.
Those rights also run in one direction. They give a creator grounds to object after something exists. They do not tell anyone in advance what that creator will allow, which is a separate problem and the one PersonaShield is built around. A creator sets their safeguards once, and those safeguards decide what gets flagged for removal and what fans can officially create.
Law sets the floor. What a creator permits is still theirs to define.
This article is general information about how these rights work, not legal advice. Publicity law varies by state, and anything with money or a real dispute attached is worth a conversation with a lawyer.
